Thursday, July 06, 2006

TSA: Shameful!

Random Secondary searches: the brainchild of Norman Mineta --can I say once again thank God he's finally retiring... I realize he's touchy about anything that even slightly resembles profiling (due to his childhood stay in a Japanese internment camp) --so he's NOT the one to be running the TSA post-9/11 and letting his personal feelings seep into National Security (IMO anyway). Why Bush didn't get rid of him after September 11th I will never understand...

If you are OK with little old ladies and 7 year old kids being pulled from airplane lines and searched ...because it makes it "fair" --well, this should be an example of what a colossal waste of time that is...

Three United States Marines (a sergeant and two corporals) in full dress blues were escorting the body of a fallen comrade back to his wife. All were members of Camp Pendleton's 3rd Assault Amphibian Battalion.

"...as the Marines went through the initial screener in their dress blues, they were stopped by several TSA agents. Each was told to remove their dress uniform blouse, belt and black dress shoes, which were scanned by the detector, as the agents scanned them with hand-held detecting wands.

“They had me take off my shoes and ran them through the screening,” Stock said, speaking by phone May 5 from Gulfport, where the men are helping with Mills’ family and funeral support. “We all got searched.”

Then they were taken to a nearby room, where TSA workers patted them down.

At one point, Stock’s shoes disappeared, leaving him to frantically search for them and retrieve them from a TSA agent. Separated from their belongings, which included the flag that they bore that would drape Mills’ casket for the rest of the journey home, they worried about getting to the gate in time to ensure his safe placement in the airplane.

Time, it seemed like a half-hour, clicked by. “I was like, hey, we need to be on the tarmac,” Stock recalled. “It just took longer than it should have had to take.”

The agents said nothing to explain why all three were singled out for additional search and the Marines didn’t protest. “We were just trying to get there as quick as we could,” he added." (source)